Nowhere Left to Land: Why a Dying Kentucky Craft May Be the Cardinal's Last Good Table Before the Freeze

Almost everyone in America who keeps a bird feeder knows the backyard birds are in trouble. Far fewer know that part of the problem may be hanging right outside their own kitchen window, full of seed, with nothing landing on it. Virgil Combs, 76, has spent 36 winters in an old tobacco barn in Berea, Kentucky, making bird feeders by hand and writing down which ones the birds actually used. This is his last winter at the bench. What he has written down over those 36 years is worth more than the feeders he made.

First Light in Berea: A Barn That Still Smells of Burley and Black Coffee

The workshop is the old stripping room at the back of a tobacco barn, barely bigger than a one-car garage. His father's tobacco knife hangs on the back wall, its handle worn into the shape of somebody else's grip. On the bench sits a row of feeders, each one waiting for the same pair of hands. Virgil Combs, 76, does not look up. He is working a fine brush into the bark lines of a dish no wider than his palm. He has been doing this since 1990.

"It isn't quitting that bothers me," he says, still not looking up. "It's what I don't see anymore. When I was a boy I'd count them on Mama's porch rail of a morning. Eleven cardinals, one February. Eleven. I stood out there an hour last winter. Two."

What Everyone Knows About Backyard Birds, and the Part Nobody Mentions

Nobody needs to tell you the birds are in trouble. North America has lost nearly 3 billion breeding birds since 1970, more than one in every four. Most of them were not rare. They were the everyday sparrows, finches and warblers. That has been in the papers since 2019. What has not been in the papers is what happens at one feeder, in one backyard, on one January morning when it is nine degrees out. That is what Virgil has spent 36 years writing down.

"Everybody blames the big farms," he says. "But a cardinal doesn't live in the middle of a cornfield. He lives along the edges. Fencerows, old trees, a brush pile, somebody's porch. Go look at a new subdivision. Lawn wall to wall, one little tree staked up in the front, not a berry bush in a mile of it. You haven't got a hundred little places for him to eat anymore. You've got a hundred yards of nothing."

His father, Ray Combs, raised burley on forty acres in Madison County and kept his fencerows the way his own father had: cedar posts, blackberry, sassafras, a white oak every so often that nobody was allowed to cut. In the 1970s farmers across the country were told to plant "fencerow to fencerow," and a great many of them did. Today more than 40 million acres of America is lawn.

"Those fencerows were the birds' kitchen. Not scenery. You'd walk one in January and flush thirty birds out of it. Then the bulldozers came through, and it went in about fifteen years. Daddy kept his till the day he died. Nobody wanted it after."

How Birds Really Find Food, and Why So Many Feeders Hang Empty

Here is the question almost nobody asks, and it is the only one that matters: if a cardinal is not at your feeder, what is he looking at?

Cornell's Project FeederWatch has catalogued how 98 of America's most common backyard birds actually feed. The answer is not the one on the store shelf:

Read that list again and notice what it is really telling you. Not one of those numbers says "buy a tube." Most of what is sold for birds hides the seed behind plastic, inside a cage, or down a hole too small to see into. The birds fly around it, land in the tree next to it, and leave.

That is the whole argument for an open dish, and it is not the argument the stores make. It is not that a dish beats a fencerow; a fencerow beats anything anyone can sell you. It is that in most American yards there is no fencerow, no old oak and no brush pile, and the one thing you can hang up in five minutes that a bird will recognize as a meal is a dish he can see into.

"A bird isn't picky," Virgil says. "He's looking. Show him the seed, give him a place to stand, and he'll come. That's the whole trick, and folks make it far harder than it is."

"The Experts All Say Plant Natives First"

They do. The entomologist Doug Tallamy puts it best: "Each plant in your landscape you should think of as a bird feeder. It either has food in it, or it doesn't." Put that to Virgil and he does not argue with it for a second.

"He's right," he says. "An oak tree beats anything I've ever made. A good oak feeds more caterpillars than you can count, and a pair of chickadees needs thousands of them to raise one nest. If you've got a piece of yard you can let go wild for ten years, plant oaks and leave it, and don't send me any money."

He sets the brush down.

"But go ask the ninety-nine in a hundred who can't. A lawn the HOA wants mowed, a patio, a porch, a fence. Telling them to let half the yard go to briars, most won't, and it isn't fair to make them feel bad about it. A dish off the porch beam they will do. Five minutes."

The same goes for doing it yourself. Plenty of people still feed from a pie plate on a stump, the way their grandmothers did. "Good," says Virgil. "Mama did. If you've got a pie pan, use it. A pie pan you can see into beats a bad bought feeder every time. It's the bad bought ones I've got a problem with."

The Feeders Bird People Wish Nobody Would Buy

Which brings us to the end cap of every big-box store in October. The twelve-dollar plastic tubes, the "squirrel-proof" wire cages, the little painted cottages with a cardinal printed on the box: the cheapest things in the category, some of the prettiest, and the ones that people who actually watch birds spend their time warning each other about.

One buyer's verdict, left under a popular model, is as flat as verdicts get: "Looks great. Impractical for feeding." Virgil has spent 36 winters arriving at the same conclusion from the other end, and he can tell you exactly which four things do the damage.

"That's the part that gets me," Virgil says. "Somebody's spent twelve dollars meaning nothing but well. And what they've bought is worse than Mama's pie pan."

Thirty-Six Winters of Going Back to Look: What Virgil Found Out

Virgil Combs did not set out to make anything at all. He spent thirty years as a lineman for the rural electric co-op, climbing poles in ice storms, and whittled in the evenings the way his father had kept fencerows. When Ray Combs died in the fall of 1989, the farm was sold. The new owners told Virgil he could have one thing: the white oak that had stood at the corner of the fencerow for longer than anybody could remember, if it ever came down. Two months later it did, in an ice storm.

"I carved a dish out of a limb because I couldn't bring myself to burn it," he says. "Hung it off my own porch beam, about the height Mama used to set her pie pan on the rail. Didn't think about it again." He stops for a moment. "Nine days later I come out with my coffee and there's a cardinal standing in it. Bright red, like he owned the place. And I thought, well. All right then."

He wrote it down: the date, the weather, exactly where it hung. Then he made one for the widow across the road and wrote that down too. Every feeder since has been made from that first dish, line for line, bark and all. That is the whole method and he has never changed it: make it, hang it, go back and look, write down what came. By the ninth winter he wanted better than his own eyes, so he did something no store had ever done. He hung a store-bought tube feeder four feet from his dish, filled both with the same seed every morning, and counted every cardinal in the first hour after sunrise.

"That's when it came clear. All those years I'd been thinking about how much seed a feeder holds. Holding isn't the job. Showing is."

The Open Table Principle: Why Small Details Decide Whether a Bird Lands

On a hard January night a chickadee can burn through about a tenth of its body weight, and it has to win that back before dark the next day, every day, until spring. A cardinal is no different: he spends the short winter daylight looking for food he can reach without being caught out in the open.

What keeps him off a feeder is rarely the lack of food. It is doubt: seed he can't see, a perch he can't use, walls that block his view of what is coming. "He doesn't go hungry because there's no seed," Virgil says. "He goes hungry because he can't find it fast enough. So the job of a feeder isn't to hold seed. It's to show it."

"Two Hundred Twelve at Mine, and Nine at the Tube"

Virgil takes the ledgers down from the shelf above the bench: not one book but nine, held together with a cracked rubber band. More than three thousand entries, and from the ninth winter on, a second column of figures down the right-hand side.

"Winter of ninety-eight," he says, tapping the page. "Two hundred and twelve at mine. Nine at the tube. Same seed, same porch, four feet apart." He shrugs. "That's two hundred hungry birds sitting in a tree, looking at a tube."

He turns forward a few years to the bark test from 2003, the page he still taps first when people ask why the outside looks the way it does: bark coat 164, painted 58. "Same dish underneath," he says. "Only thing different was what the birds saw." He turns forward again. An entry from 2006: a dish taken out to a farm near Paint Lick. "Used every winter since. The lady's daughter has it now. She sends me a card every Christmas with the date of her first cardinal of the year written inside, so I've got the whole run in her handwriting."

"That's the pay, right there. Not the money. Knowing something I made with these hands is still feeding somebody's birds twenty years on. Make a thing right and it doesn't quit."

Do This First. It Costs Nothing.

Before anybody sends Virgil any money, he would like a word about seed. The first thing costs nothing extra, because you are buying seed anyway.

Back in 1980, a U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service scientist tallied 179,000 bird visits to find out what backyard birds actually eat. The cheap fillers that bulk out most bargain bags, milo, wheat, oats and cracked corn, are rarely touched when black-oil sunflower is on offer. "Most of a cheap bag ends up on the ground," Virgil says. "That's where your rats come from. Buy black-oil sunflower. That's it. That's the whole list."

"Do that before anything else," he says, "because a feeder full of milo is an ornament, and I've got no interest in selling ornaments."

The second free thing: for the first few days, scatter a small handful of seed on the ground right under the dish, the way Cornell recommends when a new feeder isn't being found. Then hang it about ten feet from a shrub or tree, close enough for a bird to dart to cover and far enough that a cat can't wait in it.

The third: a shallow pan of fresh water within a few steps. The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service says a source of water may double the number of bird species in your yard. Change it every day or two. Not a deep bucket, never anything with soap in it.

What People Write Back After a Winter

The Questions That Come Up Most

I've never had cardinals in my yard. Is there any point?

"Most common question there is, and the answer's nearly always yes. You've got cardinals within a mile of you, I'd bet the truck on it. He doesn't have to live in your yard. He has to pass through it and see something worth stopping for. Sprinkle a little seed underneath, give it a few days, and don't move it around. I've had people write me the second winter, not the first."

Isn't it too late in the year to put one out?

"Late fall's the best time of the whole year, not the worst. That's when the wild seed and berries are running out and the birds start working the yards. Hang it in May and you'll wonder why nobody comes. Hang it now and you're open for business right when they're looking."

Won't the squirrels just empty it?

"I won't lie to you. A squirrel can get at most anything, and anybody who tells you different is selling you something. Hang it off a hook with a baffle above it, away from anything he can jump from, and put out a morning's worth instead of a week's. If yours are chewers, swap the cord for a light chain. In thirty-six years I've had more letters about blue jays than squirrels."

A Craft Ends This Winter, and So Does the Supply

After 36 winters at the bench, Virgil has come to a decision that nobody imposed on him but that his hands have made unavoidable. It is an essential tremor, a shake in both hands that has been getting worse for five years. He can still pack and hang and count. But the fine work is gone: dressing every window clean, bringing up the bark by hand until it reads like the real tree, checking that each dish hangs dead level.

"The rough work's all right," he says. "It's the close work. I can't hold a brush steady on the fine lines anymore, and if I can't do it right I won't do it at all. Daddy would've had something to say about a ragged window."

His son Dale runs a body shop in Richmond and has no interest in any of it. There is no apprentice. When Virgil stops, 36 winters of accumulated knowledge go quiet with him: the ledgers, the counts, the sense of which spot in a yard a cardinal will trust and which he won't.

What remains are the last feeders on the shelf in the barn: 74 of them when we visited in September. The final ones that will ever come out of that tobacco barn.

"The Money Was Never the Reason. It Still Isn't."

Virgil could ask more, and anyone who has held one would understand why. He has kept the final run deliberately low. Not as a sale. Not as a clearance. As a gesture.

"I don't want the money. I want them hanging in yards. I want somebody standing at their kitchen window in January saying, 'He's back.' That's worth a good deal more to me than a price on a tag."

There is another reason, and he doesn't say it so much as let it sit. His wife June passed in the spring of 2019. That summer a male cardinal started coming to the dish on his porch every morning at 6:30, the time she used to bring her coffee out. "A neighbor told me, 'Give him a reason to stay,'" Virgil says. "So I keep it full. I'd like other people to have that."

His granddaughter Kaylee, 27, runs the online side through Cedar & Tin Co., a small shop she set up at her kitchen table when the orders got past what a landline could handle. "It turns out there are thousands of people who've been looking for exactly this," she says. "Something made by somebody who actually went back out and counted."

Virgil's Bark Dish Feeder, in Brief

Where They Are Sold

Virgil's Bark Dish Feeder is sold through Cedar & Tin Co., the small online shop his granddaughter Kaylee runs. It is not in big-box stores and not on any marketplace, for the straightforward reason that one man in a tobacco barn in Kentucky cannot supply them.

This Winter Only. Then the Barn Doors Shut for Good.

The season has already begun. Across Kentucky and the Ohio Valley the last of the wild seed is being stripped from the fields, and the birds are starting to work the yards. A chickadee can lose about a tenth of its weight on a single January night. In one long-running Wisconsin study, in the hardest winter months, chickadees with a feeder nearby survived at nearly twice the rate of those without: 69 percent against 37. And the shelf in the barn in Berea is emptier every week. The run before this one sold through in eleven days.

"I want every last one of them hanging in a yard," Virgil says. "That's all I'm after. A spot by the window, a handful of sunflower, and somebody who'll bother to fill it of a morning. He'll do the rest himself."

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